How Colin Trevorrow embraced old-school effects for 'Jurassic World'

This article is an extended version of the piece first published in the July 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online

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Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park isn't just a monster-movie classic, it marked a huge leap in visual effects on its 1993 release. "That film was a step forward that I'm not sure we've seen before or since," says Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow. But for the franchise's fourth instalment, the crew wanted to push the visuals to even greater heights.

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Jurassic World picks up 22 years after the original, with the park reopened by the Masrani Global corporation. With guests bored of T. rex and velociraptors, the park is now filled with previously unseen species, such as mesosaurus -- and a new, genetically modified dinosaur, Indominus rex. To create the creatures, the crew turned to the Oscar-winning team behind the original film: animatronics company Legacy Effects -- previously Stan Winston Studios -- and Industrial Light and Magic (ILM).

"We handled things in four different ways. We have our computer-generated dinosaurs, we have our animatronic dinosaurs. We also have motion-capture dinosaurs," says Trevorrow, 38. "All of the raptors are played by people. They have a fluidity to their movement that isn’t in CGI. Plus the great thing about having the performers there is that you have guys in grey suits with helmets on, and from afar it looks kind of silly, but when you have Chris Pratt across from them trying to calm down these animals it actually helps the actors."

To choreograph the dinosaur scenes, Trevorrow again turned to Jurassic Park’s dinosaur supervisor -- and internet meme -- Phil Tippett. "I made him very aware [of the You Only Had One Job meme]. And I’ll actually say it to him. "You only have one job, Phil!" Plotting out sequences was a long, and often low-tech process.

In addition to custom-built animatronics and CGI, the film uses techniques new to the series: motion-captured velociraptors and digitally enhanced prosthetics. "Legacy built us fully textured maquettes, over which ILM would layer skin and eyes," says Trevorrow, 38. "The effect is extraordinary: humans are touching and acting off them, but there is an ability for the skin to breathe and eyes to move in a way that animatronics can't." "The very end of the movie, there is a shot that is more than a minute long and goes in and out of buildings -- so much happens in this one shot. It’s absolutely epic," says Trevorrow. "And the choreography was, we built a scale model, and Phil and I sat with toy dinosaurs going 'Raargh! And then they do this!' And it is -- almost to the action -- exactly what happens in the movie."

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But despite the progress in CGI techniques since 1993, certain scenes were still done using old-fashioned, hand-built animatronics. "There is a scene where [actors] Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard come across a dying apatosaurus," says Trevorrow. "We had a team of puppeteers using every tiny motor in this robot's face. They drew a beautiful performance out of the actors -- we couldn't have done it with a computer." But ultimately, he says, the CGI vs practical effects debate is meaningless. "If you stop thinking about the fact these are visual effects or robots, then we've won."

Jurassic World is released on June 11

This article was first published in the July 2015 issue of WIRED magazine